Page "The Last Picture Show" Paragraph 11

* Cybill Shepherd as Jacy Farrow, a pretty and popular girl who learns about life through her experiments with sexual attraction.

Shepherd was a model whom Bogdanovich spotted on the cover of an issue of Glamour magazine ( probably June 1970 ).

" There was something about her expression that was very piquant ," he later said.

He arranged to meet her with her agent in a hotel in New York.

She was, Bogdanovich says, interested in going through college and not particularly interested in being in movies, but she liked the script and thought it was an interesting part.

She was playing with a rose on the table, and Bogdanovich kept expecting the rose to keel over and collapse ; he recognised in that gesture the way Jacy Farrow plays with guys in the movie, and this convinced him that he had found Jacy.

Bert Schneider, the producer, found a screen test Shepherd had done with Roger Vadim about a year before in which she was playing scenes from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with no sound, and dancing silently to a Rolling Stones song.

After filming had finished Bogdanovich admitted to Shepherd that the only time he ever doubted his decision was when he saw that screen test.

Shepherd went to Los Angeles and read with John Ritter, and with Robert Mitchum's son as well as Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms.

Bogdanovich was married to Polly Platt but began an affair with Shepherd during the filming.